


Know You Better

by mindthetarget



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers Feels, Clintasha - Freeform, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 11:11:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4302570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindthetarget/pseuds/mindthetarget
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“There are things Natasha knows about Clint that he does not know about himself..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Know You Better

There are things Natasha knows about Clint that he does not know about himself.

1) He cannot look at a dog without smiling.

When they are on assignments, if they happen across a canine, Clint will grin. He tries to hide it, or keep it small, when he’s not supposed to be smiling. The closer the dog is, the bigger Clint’s grin threatens to become. A dog that Clint can pet may result in him smiling enough for teeth to show, and if he gets to cuddle it, there is a good chance of him smiling and maybe even laughing easily for the rest of the day.

Puppies are worse. Natasha has seen Clint turn into some bizarre form of goofy when puppies are present. At times such as those, she considers it a wonder that Clint’s entire apartment building hasn’t been filled with furry mongrels he falls in love with every five minutes.

The dog that lives with him is more of a friend and companion than a pet, and probably the only reason Clint doesn’t smile constantly at home around it is because he thinks of him as his friend, not as a dog. Lucky, he calls him, which strikes Natasha as incredibly typical of the normalcy Clint has always yearned for in life. But then again, Natasha has seen the dog eat pizza right out of Clint’s mouth, Clint grinning the entire time, and so perhaps the smile-at-dogs rule applies even to Lucky.

2) Clint’s left shoes wear out before his rights.

Though the archer is ambidextrous, he does slightly favor his left hand. Consequently, a small percentage more of his arrows are fired with a favoring to his left side rather than the right, a small percentage of his daily life is favored with his left side as well, and the weight distribution results in the left shoes taking more wear-down than the right ones.

She has tested Clint’s ambidexterity, throwing things at him without warning and at random intervals for years. Actually, she’s been doing it since the day they met. She knows he can catch equally well on either side (when she doesn’t get too sneaky and smack him in the head or chest before he can throw a hand up), but the left gets used a little extra anyway. The human brain chooses a side to favor no matter how balanced the skills, and while Clint may be unaware of his very slight favoritism, Natasha has seen it.

During missions, if Clint is taking a particularly difficult shot in close range of herself, Natasha does her best to ensure it is easy for him to use that favored lefty instinct if his subconscious chooses to.

3) Clint prefers his coffee the tiniest bit bitter when he’s feeling anxious or unsettled without clear reason; he prefers his coffee as smooth as possible when sad or angry.

Clint has his moods, the same as anyone else. He is also a coffee fiend: coffee is a tool he relies on for consciousness as well as a comfort substance. This he acknowledges, but he doesn’t seem to realize that when uncomfortable, he makes or orders his brew just a bit on the bitter side. Natasha has stocked his coffee cabinet with blends bitter and smooth, and noted how he reflexively reaches for one kind more than the other. Cheaper beans seem to be best for an anxious Hawkeye.

She thinks this is a balance thing. By imbibing something with an edge from outside himself, Clint perhaps is relieving some of the edge within his mind. Perhaps it is a chemical thing, some subtle biochemical response to those particular coffee blends that eases discomfort.

But when he’s sad, or furious, Clint’s smoother blends are a comfort of better worth, it seems. He savors these, rather than gulp them down as he usually does with coffee. When Clint is angry enough to be clenching his jaw, no longer talking things out (and Clint is the one between the two of them who is a proponent of talking for coping), Natasha brings him a coffee from a small artisanal shop out of Portland, the smoothest she has researched. She doesn’t tell him that it’s special, but she has seen it soothe his fury far quicker than mere patience.

She keeps a bag of the blend in her footlocker, carefully sealed in an airtight container, just in case, as well as a grinder and press to use solely with those beans. She has become an expert in the art of a good cup of coffee.

4) When he wants to tell her something, but time or clearance or privacy won’t allow, Clint favors standing on her left. When he wants to tell her something and is allowed, he tends to stand on her right until he blurts out whatever secret he’s about to share.

Sometimes Natasha will deliberately stand with her left side to a wall when Clint seems to be trying to keep a secret. His body becomes anxious for not being able to take up its subconscious comfort zone, and it wears him down faster.

Natasha can always get a secret out of Clint when she wants to.

And then…

5) Clint is in love with her, but he won’t tell her.

She knows, because he is standing on her left every day now. His right shoes have been wearing out faster than his lefts for the last six months because he’s on her left and leaning toward her as if he wants to speak but just can’t get the words out. It’s subtle, hardly even a degree, but it’s enough to outweigh the wear and tear on his opposite shoe.

She knows, because he is drinking exclusively cheap and bitter coffee now, which tells her he is almost perpetually uneasy. But he isn’t necessarily unhappy, because if he were, the smooth coffee would have been necessary by now. They have been together a lot lately; missions and tasks have meant their strike team is in play far more than usual in recent months. She calculates that the factor contributing to his secret happiness is her presence, and does not think this is an egotistical presumption.

She knows because, when they were working recon this morning at the cattle dog rescue in Arizona, and she was asking a volunteer questions with Clint at her side playing the parts of prospective dog adopters, she is handed a puppy…and Clint bursts into a grin not at the dog, but at her first.

Natasha knows Clint Barton better, in some ways, than he knows himself. She knows he is in love, she sees it in the ways he moves and stands, the way he smiles, the way he drinks his coffee.

She asks him if he’d like to talk. He says there is nothing to talk about.

So she replaces all his coffee with smooth blends. She starts positioning herself to force him to stand on her right side. She shaves a little bit off the soles of his shoes to force redistribution of his body weight. And finally, when he is truly off balance mentally and physically, and they have a little R&R time to spend…she steals his dog.

It takes a week for him to realize she’s the dognapper. He’s been in a tizzy since realizing Lucky is gone. There have been ‘MISSING DOG’ posters plastered all over his neighborhood and emailed to every S.H.I.E.L.D. agent in the region. Clint hasn’t slept a few nights, staying up roaming the streets in search of his paw-footed friend, pizza box in tow to hopefully catch the dog’s nose.

Natasha’s failure to respond to his texts asking if she can help him look for Lucky are what tip him off, she assumes—which is why she doesn’t respond, of course. Clint shows up at her door in the middle of the afternoon, shoving past her when she opens it, without a word. He finds Lucky in the tiny kitchen of the small safe-house she’s currently occupying, gobbling down some pizza she has ensured is free of non-canine-friendly ingredients.

“You  _stole_  my dog?!” Clint shouts when he whirls on her. “ _Why_?”

Natasha cradles her tea in her hands, leaning there in the doorway of the kitchen. “To make you angry.”

“Well, mission fucking accomplished!” he roars, flinging his arms about. “Pissed! Yes, I’m freaking pissed! The hell is wrong with you, Nat? Why would you  _mess_  with me like this? You know I love this dog!”

“I know,” she agrees with a little nod. “Though that is the first time you’ve said as much out loud. You play love very close to the vest, Barton.”

“Says the spy made of secrets,” he grumbles, turning to crouch by Lucky and scratch behind the dog’s ears. He isn’t smiling.

Natasha shifts into the kitchen. She sets her teacup down by the cooking range, then crouches on Lucky’s other side to face Clint. Lucky groans, certainly pleased to have so much attention from two sets of hands.

“You’ve been keeping something from me,” she says softly. “Why not just say what’s on your mind?”

She wants him to say it. She does not want him to feel the need to keep secrets from her. She may not feel the same way, but that doesn’t mean she wants the unspoken weight to rest between them. They can talk about this, just as they can talk about anything.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mutters back.

“You do… Did you know you favor your left side?”

He snorts and chuckles derisively. “No, I don’t. I’m ambidextrous, Nat. Left and right handed, both.” He stands up. Lucky eyes him when he makes a noise for the dog to come with, but then rolls over in favor of enjoying Natasha’s petting skills instead.

“Traitor,” Clint sighs. He isn’t leaving without his dog, however, and so she decides to talk.

“You are ambidextrous, but you still favor your left,” Natasha tells him again, and then she begins to tell him all the things she knows about him that he did not know himself.

By the time she’s finished, Clint looks like he could use some more of that bitter coffee; he’s uncomfortable. “What does all this have to do with anything? What does it have to do with kidnapping my dog?” Despite his questions, she can tell that he knows she has him figured out.

She knows he knows she knows. She smiles a little, ruefully, at the merry-go-round of it. “I used all of it to know what you’re hiding from me,” she explains. “I took Lucky to get you off your game. Now you’re tired and emotionally compromised. You’re vulnerable.”

“You’re trying to compromise me? Like I’m a mark. Nat, that’s some Grade A bull—”

“You are vulnerable, and you are safe with me.”

It’s a close parallel to things he said to her, years ago, when earning her trust. The way his eyebrows raise tells her he remembers. And he smiles, the tiniest bit, though he tries to hide it.

“You’re safe with me, and your secrets are safe with me,” she goes on. “I wanted to make you feel vulnerable so you could know that there is no reason to hide things from me. You can tell me anything, Clint, and I won’t hurt you. You know that.”

Clint blinks at her. He frowns again. He looks away, and hops up to sit on the small portion of her kitchen countertop. “You’re a real piece of work, Widow. Yeah, I know that, but this manipulative spy crap way of wheedling it out of me…”

She says nothing, only waits, quietly. She stands up, and Lucky does too. While the dog trots off to the couch, however, Natasha hops up to sit next to Clint. It’s a small space. There are cabinets over the counter that force them to hunch their shoulders forward a little. But close quarters let her touch her arm against his, from shoulder to wrist. She nudges him ever so slightly with her elbow, and he lifts his head to meet her eye.

“I know, Nat. I know. Yeah. I trust you.”

She smiles a little, and is pleased when he smiles back. To further incentivize him, she lays her hand over his. She hears the small intake of breath, as if her touch has electrified him a little. “I trust you too.”

The silence stretches. She waits. He ponders his knees. Bit by bit, their hands shift, and their fingers interlace.

After an hour, Clint is leaning towards her again. He is on her right side, by no accident. She could have sat to the other side of him, but Natasha knows Clint Barton so very well, and she chose her seating with care.

It’s so very quiet, and his voice resonates through the silence when he says at last, “So I guess I’m kind of in love with you.”

Natasha smiles. “I know.”

Clint bursts into laughter, and shakes his head. “Yeah, about that. How exactly is it that you know me better than I know myself?”

“I pay attention to the things I care about.” She squeezes his hand and hops down from the countertop, but he reaches out and twirls her around to face him.

Clint smirks. He rests his hands on her shoulders while she stands in front of him where he sits. “Hey, I know something about  _you_ ,” he says in a sing-song manner. His smirk gets smug. “You love me too.”

She has told him she won’t hurt him, so she says as gently as she can, while she shakes her head, “You know I can’t love, Barton. Love is a childish sentiment. Not a bad one, but…the child in me was stripped away long before I left childhood.”

“Aw, Nat.” Clint just grins, wiggling her shoulders playfully. “It’s love. I know you too. And you don’t go to this much trouble, this much convoluted nonsense, with  _me_ , for nothing.” He leans forward, gaze holding hers, inescapable. “You love me too,” he repeats more firmly.

And that is the moment when Natasha realizes…there’s at least one thing that Clint Barton knew about her before she knew herself.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is also on [tumblr](http://mindthetarget.tumblr.com/post/123182754930/one-shot-know-you-better).


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